


The Cellist

by Black_Crystal_Dragon



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Jossed, M/M, Memory Loss, The Cellist - Freeform, broken relationships, clint is the cellist, coulson is Team Dad, memory manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 02:29:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1249396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Crystal_Dragon/pseuds/Black_Crystal_Dragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“They changed my memories. Who’s to say they didn’t change more?” -- Coulson discovers the truth about some of the memories SHIELD altered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cellist

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Ice_Elf, who held my hand throughout the writing of this fic and beta'd it wonderfully for me. ^-^
> 
> This fic takes place between Seeds (S1E12) and TRACKS (S1E13). Assume there are spoilers for all episodes up to that point. (This is definitely an AU as of Agents of SHIELD S1E19, 'The Only Light in the Darkness'.)

It was supposed to be a simple mission – relatively speaking, anyway.

Their target was a man named Stefan Varga. His name first cropped up in Quinn Worldwide’s books as a security guard. From there, he’d moved into personal protection and was listed in Ian Quinn’s personal staff as a bodyguard. After a while, he dropped off the radar. However, when the team took a look at the big picture – Quinn Worldwide, the shell companies and Quinn’s personal financial records – it turned out that Varga had been working for Ian Quinn for years. The payment moved around frequently so that he was never on one company’s books for more than a couple of months at time, and his job description was either security-based and vague or not mentioned. It looked shady at best, and given how long Varga had been working for Quinn, it was worth pursuing.

SHIELD’s facial recognition software had brought up a hit from a security camera, and the team had gone in to bring him in for questioning.

Except nothing could ever be simple. Not for them.

When Ward had reached Varga’s apartment, Varga had detonated a smoke-bomb in his face and dived out of the window. Something – part of the bomb or another device entirely, it was impossible to tell which – had knocked out all communications. Now Skye was sitting in a hired van a block away with Fitz, the two of them trying not to panic while they reset their equipment.

“Where’s Varga?” were Ward’s first words when the comms were re-established.

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know!” Fitz snapped. He and Skye were typing furiously, both of them scrambling to access systems that were still in the process of rebooting.

“Where are you?” Skye asked, scanning through security camera feeds of the area surrounding Varga’s apartment in an attempt to find Ward and their mark. She knew both men must have left the building, but which way they had headed was anyone’s guess.

Although Ward gave her no answer, it didn’t take her long to find the right camera. It was at a bad angle, focused on the wrong part of the alley, but it was better than nothing. Ward was scuffling with a handful of men in dark clothes. She maximised the window, and for a moment simply stared. Ward was outnumbered, but clearly the most skilled fighter – his opponents were not so much a threat as a delay, a distraction that he didn’t need when their target was getting away.

He put down one of the men with a vicious kick to the throat and snapped, “Find him!”

“Working on it,” Fitz muttered testily as he ripped his communicator out of his ear and threw it aside. “Whatever he used back there, it’s scrubbed the data off every bug, tape, and video feed within a mile radius. I can’t magically bring back data that isn’t there!”

There was silence but for the sound of furious typing, the rattle of the chairs’ casters as they moved around one another.

“Someone remind me why we have to be in this bloody van again?” Fitz growled as Skye’s elbow clashed with his.

Then someone banged on the back doors, three times. They jumped, then froze and looked at one another. Fitz mouthed, “What do we do?”

After a second, Skye whispered into her earpiece, “Hey, S.O. We have a problem.”

“You want to be a field agent, you deal with it,” he snarled, breathless and frustrated. He grunted, but Skye couldn’t tell whether he was landing a punch or receiving one. A glance at the screen showed her that there were still plenty of bad-guys to be deal with on the ground, so they would be getting no help from that quarter. Not for a few minutes at least.

There was another double bang on the back doors, followed by some scuffling. Then a masculine voice called, “Open up, kids. I got a present for you.”

The accent was incongruously American, considering that they were in Ljubljana. There was a more solid thump, this one against the side of the van. It was accompanied by swearing: one voice in English, and the other presumably Slovenian. Skye glanced across at Fitz, who was not the backup she would have chosen for this situation, and steeled herself. She pulled her gun and found the safety, flicking it off – and, hooray, she could tell Ward that she hadn’t accidentally dismantled her own gun during this particular emergency. Skye got up, ignoring the sharp intake of breath and the fingers plucking at her sleeve, and crept over to the back doors. She shoved open the door and stuck her gun through, twisting around to look outside.

For a second she thought there was no one there. Then a stocky man wearing a leather jacket hauled a second man into view, sliding his captive’s body along the side of the van. He grinned, and there was kind of a manic glint in his eyes as he said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Skye said uncertainly, surprised because she recognised this guy’s face but couldn’t place where from. She glanced at the second man, and realised that he was their target. “Hey!”

“Told you I had a present,” the man in the leather jacket said, yanking Varga away from the van and spinning him around to face Skye. “Move over.”

“Whoa whoa whoa!” Skye yelped, flapping her gun at him. “Who the hell are you? How did you find him? And how did you know we were here?”

“One, Agent Barton,” the man in the leather jacket said. “Two, easily. Three, your transmissions aren’t as hard to trace as your techies would like to believe.” He released the suspect with one hand and dug in his jeans pocket, pulling out what looked like a slim glass rectangle and waving it at them. “When a guy like me can hack your comms with one of these, you should probably upgrade your security.”

Skye’s gun dipped. “Is that a Starkphone?”

“Yup,” the stranger said, and took advantage of her lowered guard to shove the suspect past her into the van, then climb in himself.

Fitz started talking, babbling nervously about protocols and the delicacy of the equipment, as their suspect was slammed into Skye’s vacated seat. The stranger grabbed a handful of zip ties from Fitz’s open bag and tied Varga to the chair with the kind of ease that only comes with practice. Varga said something in Slovenian; the stranger responded by punching him in the face hard enough to knock him out. Fitz abruptly shut up.

The stranger – Barton – put the Starkphone back into his pocket, then turned to Skye. “You might want to close the door.”

“You know we have backup on the way here right now?” Skye asked.

“Yeah, Agent Ward,” Barton replied. He didn’t seem perturbed by this knowledge, which was worrying. He paused and smiled, looking at each of them in turn as he took a seat next to the suspect. “You should probably let him know you have company.”

Fitz coughed, in an attempt to discreetly catch Skye’s attention that was really not subtle at all. Barton smiled at him.

“Oh, don’t mind me. Seriously. Have your little team meeting, or whatever. Pretend I’m not even here.”

Fitz got up and hurried over to where Skye was standing without taking his eyes off the stranger. She couldn’t blame him: he didn’t seem to have a weapon, but he’d found and apprehended Varga by himself. Given that the guy had military training and a record as long as Skye’s arm, that in itself was pretty intimidating all on its own.

“That’s Agent Clint Barton,” Fitz said in an undertone. He held out a tablet out for Skye to see. It was displaying a SHIELD profile: Level Six clearance; ‘archer’, ‘marksman’ and ‘sniper’ listed under special skills; and under aliases –

“You’re Hawkeye!” Skye blurted.

Barton – Hawkeye – smiled serenely. “Hi.”

“I knew I recognised him!” Skye said.

After the battle for New York, the Avengers’ faces had been plastered across the internet for weeks. They still were now, in fact. Some they couldn’t hide: Tony Stark and Bruce Banner had made headlines before. Even Steve Rogers couldn’t be concealed for long, not once someone compared his face to the 1940s Captain America trading cards. They hadn’t even tried with Thor, but then, Thor didn’t have any documents that could be traced by Earth’s media. The Black Widow and Hawkeye, on the other hand, had remained anonymous, their identities – names, birth dates, home locations – effectively scrubbed from the records by SHIELD.

Fitz glanced at Hawkeye, then back at Skye. He leaned in closer and hissed, “I can’t believe you’re – _fangirling_.”

“Hey, come on, he saved New York – and pretty much the rest of the world. Don’t tell me that you’re a not little bit excited that he’s in our van.”

Hawkeye smirked, and that was apparently the last straw.

“He shouldn’t be here!” Fitz snapped, not bothering to keep his voice down now as he turned to glare at Hawkeye. “This mission is –”

“Totally not as top secret as you think,” Barton said, folding his arms. “It took Stark, like, ten minutes to get your current location from SHIELD’s servers.”

“Stark’s here?” Fitz squeaked.

“Now who’s fangirling?” Barton chuckled, and Fitz snapped his mouth shut. “Sorry to disappoint you, Agent Fitz, but he couldn’t be here personally. You just got me.”

“And why are you here?” Skye asked, taking a step towards him. “I mean, honestly, it’s really cool having one of the Avengers right here in front of me –” Barton snorted. “– but I’m pretty sure that SHIELD would have let us know if you were coming to help us out, and since we haven’t heard anything, I’m guessing that you’ve not here on official business.”

Barton continued to smile, but it took on a calculated quality now. He said, “I can’t wait to see your Bus.”

“Skye?” Ward said into Skye’s ear, before anyone could speak again. “What’s your status? Problem solved?”

Skye glanced at Fitz, then remembered that he wasn’t wearing his earpiece. “We’re okay. Everything’s under control. Problem is … ongoing. We have Varga in custody and, uh, there’s another SHIELD agent here. Agent Barton.”

There was a moment of silence that lasted too long. “I’ll be there in two minutes. Not another word until I get back.”

Ward arrived back at the van in one minute and fifty three seconds. He pulled open the back doors and nodded. “You two, up front. Fitz, get us back to the Bus.”

“Agent Ward! What a pleasure,” Baron said in a sing-song voice as Ward got into the van. He deposited the laptop bag that was over his shoulder on the floor and herded Skye and Fitz out, tossing Fitz his earpiece as he did so. Then without another word he slammed the door, harder than was really necessary.

Fitz exchanged a glance with Skye, then the two of them trooped around to the front of the van.

It didn’t take long to arrive back at the airfield were the Bus was currently parked. Skye touched her earpiece. “What now?”

“Get on board,” Ward snapped. “I’ll bring Varga and Barton.”

Skye started to ask, “Should we tell –”

“No,” Ward interrupted. “No talking, not here. On board. Now.”

Skye frowned. “What’s up with you? Is this about Hawkeye?”

“Fitz, get Skye on board and explain,” Ward replied.

Skye rolled her eyes, but got out of the van without saying anything else. Fitz led her up the ramp and into the lab, closing the doors behind them. Then he took a deep breath. “We are all aware of Level Seven classified information. There are certain people – Agent Barton, for instance – who do not have access to that information.”

“What classified information?” Skye asked. “I’m not even Level One, how can I have access to a Level Seven secret?”

“It’s Agent Coulson,” Fitz said after a pause.

“What about him?” Skye asked he didn’t immediately continue.

Fitz took a deep breath. “Technically speaking, he died. At the Battle of New York.”

“What?” Skye breathed.

“It was only for a few seconds, before they managed to bring him back,” he added quickly. “But only agents with Level Seven clearance and above know that that. And Agent Barton is Level Six.”

Skye turned around to look through the glass wall as Ward escorted Barton up the ramp. His wrists had been bound with zip tied in front of him, but he wasn’t fighting as Ward guided him towards the stairs.

“So he thinks Coulson’s dead?”

Fitz nodded. “All the Avengers do.”

A few minutes later, Ward returned with Simmons close on his heels. While she headed down the ramp, Ward opened the door to the lab. “Coulson and May will be in the command centre shortly. Barton’s in the interrogation room, so for now I’m going to lock Varga in here once Simmons has given him the once-over, and we’ll meet you upstairs.”

He turned to follow Simmons out to the van. Skye shared another glance with Fitz before the two of them headed up to the command centre in silence. Fitz took a seat, but she couldn’t settle so she brought up the feed from the camera inside the interrogation room, where Barton was now waiting. He looked calm, but he was sitting very still.

~~~

Coulson looked up at the knock on his door. “Come in.” 

It was May. She stepped in and closed the door behind her.

“Has Ward given you an explanation?” he asked. Twenty minutes ago, Ward had sent back word on a private channel that they should initiate radio silence, and advised Coulson stay in his office. He had complied out of caution, but Ward hadn’t said why and he was anxious to have a reason.

“We have a security issue,” she said. “Agent Barton is here.”

He couldn’t help the surprise that flashed across his face, but he locked it down as quickly as he was able. Still, May wouldn’t have missed it.

“Where is he?” he asked, his voice coming out as a croak. His mouth was suddenly dry, though he couldn’t understand why.

If she noticed, May didn’t show any sign. “We have him in the interrogation room now.”

Coulson nodded and got up, striding past her and heading towards the command centre. He could see through the glass walls that the rest of the team were already there and someone had already brought up the video feed. His heart skipped when he saw Barton’s familiar, totally still form seated at the table.

He stepped into the interrogation room and stared for a moment at Barton. Then he tore his eyes away. “What happened?”

He looked at Fitz and Skye, as did the rest of the team. They shared a glance before Skye started talking. She told them that Barton had brought Varga to the van they’d been using as a mobile base, barged his way in and settled down with no explanation of what he wanted.

“Well, we can confirm that Agent Barton wasn’t sent here by SHIELD,” Simmons said quietly when Skye had finished. She transferred something from the tablet in her hand to the big screen. “He was taken off active duty several months ago. According to his files, he should still be in New York.”

Coulson looked at the document Simmons had found. It was a psychological evaluation, dated shortly after the battle for New York, and it wasn’t good. He scanned the report; the words ‘paranoid delusions’ cropped up a number of times. The file also showed links to a number of follow-up assessments. Coulson took the tablet from Simmons and flicked through: the majority of them had been missed, and those Barton had attended didn’t yield much. It looked like he’d been escorted to some by SHIELD security, but it didn’t make any difference: in the end, he’d just stopped talking.

“It says he’s refused grief counselling,” Skye said, nodding at the initial report that was still up on the screen. “They really all think you’re dead?”

“Yes,” Coulson said. The word felt heavier than it ought to. May, however, was shaking her head.

“I don’t think he does. He told you that it was Stark who located us?” May said, looking at Skye for confirmation. When she nodded, May continued, “Why are the Avengers hacking into SHIELD? Why look for us? Maybe because they’re looking for you.”

“Maybe,” Coulson said, turning towards her. “We need to find out for sure.”

~~~

It was pretty much impossible to be comfortable in the interrogation room in the Bus, but it was far from the most uncomfortable spot that Clint had ever been stuck in. When May had dropped him off and cut the zip ties off his wrists, he had settled himself in the chair and gone sniper-still. Focusing on his breathing helped – helped the anxiety that was jangling at the back of his mind. He hadn’t been able to settle since New York – no, since he’d received word about Coulson. 

The door opened and Agent May stepped in. Barton smiled at her. He’d been secretly hoping they’d send her, rather than Agent Ward, who he didn’t know at all except by his reputation. May might be deadly, but she was a known quantity. She wasn’t easy to play, but he had more of a chance with her to get the information he wanted from her.

She took a seat opposite and folded her hands on the table. “What are you doing here, Barton?”

“Oh, you know, taking a vacation. I figured I’d earned it after the world-saving gig.”

“You’re on the no-fly list,” May said evenly, “And you told us earlier that you’ve been tracking this mobile command unit specifically. I’d like you to tell me why.”

Barton leaned forwards, all traces of his smile fading. “Yeah, okay. Sure. One thing, though.”

May’s jaw tightened, but she played along. “What?”

Clint deliberately looked up towards the security camera in the corner. “I want to talk to Agent Coulson.”

There was a long silence. Eventually, May said, “Agent Coulson is dead.”

Clint barked out a laugh, short and bitter, as he turned his attention back to her. “Seriously?”

“I understand that Agent Coulson was your supervising officer,” May said.

Clint tuned her out as she ran through the usual platitudes: _you must have been close_ and _it’s a tragic loss for everyone who knew him_. He felt in his pocket for his Starkphone and unlocked it with a swipe of his fingers, scrolling through the stored data until he found what he was looking for. Agent May had just got to the _I knew Coulson too_ part when he set the phone down on the table top with a clink and slid it across.

“If Coulson’s dead,” he said, cutting her off. “You want to explain to me why his name is all over the paperwork for SHIELD mobile command centre 6-1-6, a.k.a. ‘The Bus’?” 

May glanced at the Starkphone, but only briefly. She glared at him. “Agent Coulson was about to be transferred to this command when Project PEGASUS went down. He never saw this plane. He died before –” 

“Then how is his signature on a requisition order dated last week?” Clint said, his voice rising to a shout as he reached the end of the sentence. He was on his feet without really knowing when he’d got up. He grabbed the phone and thrust it towards her, his entire arm shaking. In a furious undertone, he said, “Take it. Look at it. And stop lying to me.” 

May slid the phone out of his hand without taking her eyes off him. She very slowly got up and went to the door. 

Clint let her leave, then gave in to the anger. His hands were already balled into fists. He let out a roar as he turned and slammed his fist into the wall as hard as he could. It hurt. The pain was good; grounding. It let him breathe. He turned his back on the unmarked wall as his hands slowly loosened their grip on the air, braced himself against it. He slid to the floor, his arm coming up to cradle his injured knuckles close to his chest. He breathed as deeply as he was able, in gulps and gasps, his lungs not quite sucking in enough air. 

He pressed his spine against the straight line of the wall and closed his eyes. He rested his wrists on his knees and stilled his muscles, denied them the luxury of shaking. The cameras’ eyes would be watching. He didn’t want to look weak. Not if Coulson was there. 

Especially if he wasn’t. 

~~~

May strode into the command centre and handed the Starkphone to Fitz. “Where did he get this?” 

Fitz took a look. “I – I don’t – this should be encrypted, it’s stored on a secure server –”

“What has he got?” Coulson asked. He didn’t look away from the screen that was still showing Barton’s mini-breakdown until Fitz held the phone out. On-screen there was a requisition order for ammunition which had been signed and dated by him, as Barton had said. He looked around at the others. “Barton didn’t get this by himself.”

“Stark?” Simmons suggested.

“Probably,” May said darkly.

“Can we convince him it’s a clerical error?” Ward suggested. “Someone put the wrong date on the file?”

“Yeah, ‘cause he’s totally going to fall for that,” Skye said. “Come on, Ward, look at the guy. He’s risked a lot to be here at all. I mean, I don’t know exactly what the sentence is for getting out of the country when you’re on a no-fly list, but I’m guessing it’s pretty severe. Not to mention that he’s busted his way into a classified mission. He knew where we were, who we were looking for, he admitted to hacking into our communications … I don’t think he’s going to accept ‘clerical error’ as an explanation.”

“Skye’s right,” Coulson said before Ward could reply. “I know Barton. He’s stubborn. He won’t let this go.”

“What are you suggesting?” May asked.

“I’m suggesting that I go and talk to him,” Coulson said.

May’s face hardened. “We should call this in. Let Fury deal with it. It’s his call –”

“It’s not his call,” Coulson snapped. He couldn’t help it; not after what he’d learned. Fury had made enough decisions for him. There was a long silence. He could feel Skye’s eyes on him. Of all of the people on board the Bus, she was the most empathic, the most able to see people despite their many layers – and not so long ago, she’d seen him stripped bare.

Eventually, May said, “Your status is classified. Telling Barton –”

“Should be my decision,” Coulson said, and this time he was careful to keep his voice calm and even. May said nothing; it was Skye who broke the silence.

“What happened to trusting the system?” she asked. She folded her arms as he turned to look at her. “That’s what you told me: that we have to trust the system. Now you want to just …” She trailed off, shaking her head. “Betray them?”

“Don’t you think that my status – and who knows about it – is my business?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course it is,” she said. “But you’ve kept it a secret this long. Why the sudden change of heart?”

Coulson looked over at the screen. Barton had got up and started to pace, his fingers scrubbing through his hair.

“I’ve had enough of secrets,” he said. He didn’t wait for a response from anyone. He walked out of the command centre and started towards the interrogation chamber.

A few seconds later, someone jogged after him. He recognised the gait after a couple of steps: Skye. She caught at his arm. “Hey. Hey!”

He stopped in the corridor that led to the interrogation room door, more or less out of sight of the command centre where the rest of the team had remained. Only then did he turn around.

“What happened to you?” Skye whispered. Her brows were drawn together with worry.

He forced himself to smile. “Nothing you need concern yourself about.”

“No,” she said firmly. “Something changed, since we got you back. Whatever they did to you –”

“No,” he said with a tiny shake of his head. What happened in the Mojave Desert wasn’t what changed him. That happened before, in a SHIELD facility somewhere.

“Whatever they did,” Skye said, raising her voice to talk over his protest, “And you can keep saying that it’s nothing – if you want to keep it a secret, that is your choice. But you were fine with keeping things secret because SHIELD said so. I know you’re not exactly Mr By-The-Book because here I am, but … you didn’t actually break the system. Not until now.”

“Until now, I hadn’t seen what it did to them,” he said.

It was partly the truth. Skye was right, in a lot of ways: regaining his memories had made him more apathetic towards SHIELD’s rules, less accepting of the system and the authority above him. He was done with implicitly trusting a system that could do that to him. Yet it wasn’t defiance alone that made him want to walk into the interrogation room and reveal himself.

He knew Barton. He’d been his SO for years, mostly because handling Barton was like handling a cat, and every other supervising officer assigned to him had dropped him after one mission. He was too headstrong. He didn’t always follow orders. It was a miracle he’d survived in SHIELD at all, let alone become one of their top operatives. In part that was thanks to Coulson, who was very, very good at handling cats; that was probably why he’d got the Avengers gig in the first place, not to mention the Bus. In more recent times, Barton hadn’t really needed an SO but Coulson’s name had never officially been taken off his file. This meant that Coulson got copies of all of Barton’s mission reports and statements, his disciplinaries and evaluations. It had also meant that Barton occasionally came to hang out in his office, whenever they were in the same location and he was off-duty. He’d enjoyed the company. All of these things were more than enough to make them friends.

It had been hard to watch him react to May’s questions. It was harder still to think of him in the aftermath of the battle for New York. He’d read the reports of the whole incident. Barton wouldn’t have found out he was dead until after – when he was in physical pain from the battle, and still hurting from whatever Loki did to rewire his brain.

Barton’s personal files had stopped coming to him since his death, so he hadn’t seen the psychologists’ reports until Simmons pulled them up. He hadn’t considered what his death might do, beyond catalysing disparate elements into the Avengers. Barton hadn’t taken it well, to say the least, and combined with the after-effects of Loki’s mind-control the result was unpleasant to witness.

He couldn’t change what Loki had done. However, he did have the power to tell Barton the truth, and hopefully ease his paranoia.

“Excuse me,” he murmured, and walked away towards the interrogation room. This time, Skye did not follow him.

He paused when he reached the door, hand hovering just out of reach of the keypad and heart pounding. He wasn’t sure why he felt so unsettled, why Barton’s distress had struck him so hard. He took several deep breaths, then keyed in the door release code and stepped over the threshold.

Barton stopped pacing and looked up, and then froze.

It wasn’t the stillness of the sniper, where every muscle was controlled. He’d even stopped breathing. His face was slack with shock. He was motionless as if he’d been caught in the eye of a gun and didn’t dare move in case someone pulled the trigger. His throat moved as he swallowed, and then finally he spoke.

“You’re alive.”

It was barely a whisper, broken and barely audible. It cut into Coulson like a knife. He let out the breath that had been trapped inside his lungs and said, “Yes.”

Barton moved, stumbling across the room in a rush only to halt a couple of feet from Coulson so abruptly that it was as if he’d hit an invisible barrier. He stared, his eyes too-wide and too-bright, a frown digging deep lines into his forehead. Coulson could hear every one of his breaths. After a few seconds, Barton asked, “Can I …?”

Coulson nodded. Barton’s hands, normally so steady around a gun or the grip of his bow, shook as they landed on Coulson’s shoulders. He smoothed them down Coulson’s biceps to his elbows, and as he did so, the tightness in his features relaxed. His breathing calmed. He squeezed Coulson’s arms, almost as if he was testing to make sure that he was truly solid.

“You’re here,” Barton said as he let him go. “You’re actually – oh my God.”

Then he surged forwards, both hands coming up to land on either side of Coulson’s neck. Coulson had a second to register the feeling of the other man’s calluses before Barton kissed him hard on the mouth.

It didn’t last long – barely long enough for Coulson’s stomach to lurch – but when Barton pulled back he didn’t move far. One of his thumbs stroked the sensitive skin behind Coulson’s ear. He shivered, then snapped out of the initial shock.

“What was that?”

Barton blinked at him, the frown starting to make a reappearance. “What was what?”

“That,” Coulson said. He lifted his arms, pushing Barton’s hands off his neck so that he could take a step back. His heart was pounding. He felt as if someone had sent an electric shock tingling beneath every inch of his skin, and the energy had settled in an unpleasant lump behind his Adam’s apple. 

“Oh, come on – you just came back from the dead!” Barton said, “And I’m not allowed to kiss you? No. Screw SHIELD protocol, come here.”

Barton reached for him, but Coulson dodged his fingers and took another step back. He raised both hands, palms out, to deflect him if necessary, but Barton had stopped and was looking at him oddly.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I don’t think that your behaviour is appropriate, Agent Barton.”

A ripple of confusion passed across Barton’s face, leaving behind deeper lines across his brow. After a moment, when Coulson said nothing further, the confusion gave way to anger.

“Okay, seriously? We’re doing this? You expect me to just pretend that there’s nothing?” He gestured at the space between the two of them. Then he laughed bitterly. When he continued, he was on the verge of shouting. “Well, screw that too, Phil! I’m pretty sure Fury knows from reading the shrinks’ notes on me, anyway, so what’s the point?”

He stepped forwards again, but Coulson was careful to maintain the distance. He cleared his throat and asked, “What does Fury know, exactly?”

The words came out far more tentatively than he would have liked. Barton blinked at him. Then in a monotone, he said, “You know what. This isn’t funny, Phil.”

“Do I look like I’m laughing?” Phil replied. The anger was giving way to confusion again on Barton’s face. He let his hands drop a little lower.

“No,” Barton said. He took a couple of steps back, latched on to the edge of the table and walked around it until he bumped into the chair, where he sat down heavily. He rested his elbows on the table top and put his head in his hands. He started to rock back and forth as he spoke. “No, no. This is wrong. It was real. I swear it was real.”

His voice was little more than a desperate whine. It was so quiet that Coulson could barely hear, but he could catch enough. His heart twisted, as it had when he’d watched Barton slide down the wall earlier. He wanted to go over to him, though he wasn’t sure what comfort he could offer. He wanted to simply offer his presence, if nothing else.

Instead, he looked up toward the camera that was lurking in the shadows of the corner. “Skye. Shut off all the cameras and mics in this room.”

It was Ward’s voice that came back through the intercom. “Sir, you know we can’t do that.”

“Agent Ward, I’m not asking you. This is an order: shut off all recording equipment, power down the screens. Agent Barton is not a threat to this command; he is not here to compromise the safety and security of this team or our mission.”

“You can’t know that, sir,” Ward said.

“I do,” he replied. Whatever Barton was here for, it had nothing to do with the Bus and everything to do with Coulson himself. “This is a personal matter. As such, this conversation does not need to be on the record.”

“Agent Coulson,” May started, but Coulson cut her off.

“Now, Skye.”

“You got it,” Skye replied.

Coulson continued to stare into the camera’s eye for a few seconds. There was probably an argument erupting in the command centre right now, but he trusted Skye to do as he asked. When he was satisfied that enough time had elapsed, he stopped resisting the urge to go over to Barton. He sat down in the chair opposite and folded his hands on the table.

“Clint?”

Barton raised his head, hope flaring in his eyes. It burned briefly, then died as he took in Coulson’s expression. He scrubbed a hand over his face and dug his fingers hard into his tear ducts. Then he let it drop back onto the table.

“It was real,” he said. “It is. It has to be. Why would Loki put that in my head?”

The idea of planting a memory into someone else’s mind made Coulson flinch.

It was barely a twitch, but Barton reached out automatically and put his hand over Coulson’s. Almost as soon as the contact was there, it was gone, Barton yanking his hand back and murmuring a miserable apology. Yet the way he’d done it without even thinking made Coulson pause. Giving Barton such memories wouldn’t have been of any advantage to Loki: they would only have compromised Barton’s loyalty to his new master. If he had, it wouldn’t have such far-reaching effects as to change Barton’s subconscious behaviour. There was also no evidence to suggest that Loki was even capable of engineering and implanting a memory. None of it made sense.

Yet it didn’t make sense for the memories to be real, either. Coulson thought of his cellist. He’d loved her, he remembered loving her; he wouldn’t have betrayed her by having a relationship with Barton.

He looked across the table at the other man. Barton wasn’t looking at him, but rather at his own fingers. He was picking at one of the calluses, shaking his head slightly every so often and muttering to himself. Coulson tried to imagine – to remember – those arms around him, that mouth against his own. Though he couldn’t quite manage either, the thought wasn’t repellent. He was surprised to find that he didn’t even feel bad for considering it, in spite of his feelings for her.

A thought wormed its way into his brain, unwanted. He’d remembered the surgery, but only after he’d broken through the artificial memory that SHEILD had implanted. Dr Streiten had admitted that there was damage to his brain. What if they’d altered more of his memories in their attempt to fix him?

He tried to push the idea away. He trusted May’s word that everything he remembered apart from Tahiti was real. Yet the thought clung on. It had never been far out of his thoughts, and now it had dug its hooks in deeper than ever before.

“I was seeing a cellist,” he said quietly, as much to himself as to the man sitting opposite. The way he felt about her couldn’t have been engineered, he was sure of that. It had to be real.

Barton looked up.

“Phil,” he said, his voice empty. “I was the cellist.”

There was a long silence as the two of them stared at one another. Then Coulson shook his head. “No. No, she was –”

“Our cover,” Barton said loudly, cutting him off. “It was your idea. We couldn’t tell SHIELD about this,” he gestured between them again; Coulson wondered whether he was unable to put their relationship into words, or simply unwilling to say _partner_ or _boyfriend_ , “Because then they would have made you give up on being my SO, stopped putting us on missions together, all that crap. We tried to keep it a secret for a while, but then people starting noticing that you were getting laid. We had to figure out something to tell them. So you told them you’d started dating ‘the cellist’.”

Coulson raised his eyebrows. “If I was with you, why would I pretend that my partner was a woman?”

“More plausible for your demographic,” Barton said, raising one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. When Coulson stared at him, he snapped, “What? That’s what you said! Middle-aged suits working for government agencies tend to have relationships with women, so that’s what people expected from you.” He paused for a second, his eyes darting away, then added, “Anyway, it’s not like you told them. You said that you said you’d started going out with ‘a cellist’ and every single person asked, ‘Oh, what’s _she_ like?’ so you just went with it.”

“No, I remember – I remember going to see her play,” Coulson said, fumbling for the correct memory even as he spoke and panicking when it didn’t come easily. He didn’t sound as sure as he would like. There was a disjoint when he thought of going to see the Philharmonic, or watching her practice. A horribly familiar lurch. His mind replayed Tahiti to him, and when the image skipped and revealed the medical lab where he had been resurrected, his breath caught.

He’d never trusted his recollections of Tahiti; they’d always felt off. On the other hand, while thinking about the cellist was bittersweet, it didn’t feel wrong. It didn’t make him suspicious. He took a deep breath and tried to find a solid memory, without the jumps and interruptions.

“We went out for dinner whenever I was in town. I _remember_ that.”

“Okay. What else. What was she like?” Barton asked. Coulson frowned at him. He shifted in his seat, sitting up a little straighter. “Look, I just – humour me.”

“She was,” Phil said, then stopped short. He closed his eyes, so he could picture her more clearly, and tried to bring an image of her into his mind’s eye. Her hair, her eyes, the shape of her face; the details slipped away whenever he focused on them. Yet he remembered the way her hand fit against his, the sensation of her lips, the skill of her fingers with a bow. She’d been able to make him laugh.

“What was her name?” Barton prompted.

Coulson opened his eyes and started helplessly at him. His mind reached for the answer to the question, but none came.

After another long silence, Barton said quietly, “You never told anybody her name.”

“I loved her,” Phil breathed.

“No, you loved me,” Barton snapped. Then he blinked, his gaze focused on something distant. In a soft, distant voice, he added, “Wow, I did not think I’d find that out like this.”

“What makes you think you’re right?” Coulson said, his voice small and afraid.

He knew the reasons, chief among them that he could barely remember anything about her at all. He was thinking about that fact himself. He just didn’t want to admit it, because that meant that SHIELD had done more than just bring him back and try to cover up their own atrocities. It meant that they’d reached into his mind and rearranged things, and not put everything back in its rightful place. That wasn’t something he wanted to contemplate. Not again, not so soon after he’d started to piece himself back together.

“Can you tell me anything about – her?” Barton said eventually. “Anything concrete. What she looked like, what perfume she wore.”

“The Clairvoyant knew her,” Coulson said, latching on to that fact. Raina had mentioned the cellist. He swallowed hard and regurgitated the words: “They told me she cried for days. That she loved me.”

“I did,” Barton said. “I don’t know who the hell the Clairvoyant is, or how they know that – because not even Tasha knows that – but I did.” He took a deep breath and looked Coulson dead in the eyes. “And I do.”

Coulson looked down at the table top in front of him, desperately scouring his memory for anything solid. He didn’t have any photographs of the two of them together, no videos. He couldn’t even recall the scent of her perfume or her shampoo. Beyond the façade of a happy, mostly long-distance relationship, there was nothing. Now that he knew it, he half expected the barriers to break as they had with Tahiti, and the real memories to flood back. That didn’t happen. He still couldn’t recall ever having kissed Barton, or thought about kissing him, before today.

Barton’s hand slid across until it bumped against his, and this time the touch remained. “Hey.”

“I need to tell you about Tahiti,” he said. Barton wasn’t cleared for it, but right now he didn’t give a damn.

Barton’s brow twitched. “Tahiti?”

The words didn’t spring out of his mouth automatically any more, which was satisfying enough in itself to bring a little smile to his face, but Coulson said them anyway: “It’s a magical place.”

He glanced up at the camera again. He hoped that his team had enough sense to recognise what was and wasn’t their business; he hoped he could trust them to obey his orders. Still, they were SHIELD agents, and he knew for a fact that Ward and May weren’t happy with him being in here without surveillance. So he pushed his chair back and stood up.

“We can’t talk here. Come on, I’ll take you to my office,” he said.

He let the way out of the interrogation room with Barton following close behind him. The rest of the team were sitting in the lounge, watching for them. Coulson didn’t bother to look towards the command centre; if they had left the cameras and microphones on and kept watching after he’d asked for them to be shut down, the evidence would be long gone by now. Instead, he paused to address them.

“I’m taking Agent Barton to my office. Where’s Varga?”

“In the lab,” Simmons replied. “Still unconscious. We have his laptop, but haven’t looked at it yet.”

Her eyes flicked over his shoulder to land on Barton for a moment. Coulson glanced back at him; he shrugged. “He was being uncooperative.”

Coulson looked back at his team. “Move him to the interrogation room, start questioning him if he wakes up.”

He gestured for Barton to follow him and headed up the spiral staircase to his office. He held the door open, and as Barton brushed past him with a murmur of thanks, the familiarity of his scent (leather and sweat and aftershave) was so familiar that for a second Coulson couldn’t breathe. Yet it didn’t trigger a memory.

He stepped inside, closing the door behind him, and allowed himself the luxury of a moment to recover while he watched Barton. The other man stood for a moment in the centre of the room, giving it a cursory once over. Then he stuck his hands in his pockets and gravitated towards the shelves. Though he peered at the memorabilia on display with apparent interest, he didn’t touch anything without permission. He stopped for a minute in front of the plan of the plane to take in the layout. Then he worked his way around to the windows, keeping his back to the desk so that he wouldn’t see any of the documents Coulson had left out. He looked out at the airfield. Then he looked at Coulson.

“So, Tahiti?”

Coulson nodded. “Have a seat.”

As Barton settled himself in the chair, Coulson steeled himself and walked over to sit behind his desk. It was only then that he realised he had no idea where to even begin. How to articulate what had happened to him. What had been done to him.

Eventually, Barton cleared his throat. “Okay, I get that this is difficult. Believe me, I can see that. But, see, I don’t have psychic powers so at some point you are going to have to talk to me if you want me to know about whatever this is.”

“Why don’t we start with what you already know?” Coulson suggested.

Barton nodded and sat a little straighter in his chair. “Fury said you died.”

“The Avengers had to believe it,” Coulson said. The trust between SHIELD and the Avengers had started out tenuous enough. Even if his death hadn’t been a lie at first, it had quickly become one, and Fury was probably worried that he’d never be able to win back their confidence. He cleared his throat and went on. “So he made the fact that I’m alive Level Seven classified information.”

“So Fury faked your death, just to make sure the Avengers Initiative didn’t fall apart?” Barton said hollowly. “You couldn’t tell me you were alive because of – of protocol?”

Coulson swallowed, but he still couldn’t force the words out. When he had been silent for more than a minute, Barton spoke again in a quiet voice.

“Phil?”

“I died,” he blurted, and it actually felt good to say the words. He took a deep breath and carried on. “Loki stabbed me through the heart, and I died.” It was an effort to continue staring into Barton’s eyes. “They told me that I stopped breathing for eight seconds. They lied.”

“Well, what happened?” Barton asked, sitting forward in his chair. “How long was it?”

“Four days,” Coulson replied.

Barton blinked, then stared. Coulson remained silent, letting it sink in. Eventually, Barton shook his head and croaked, “How?”

“I don’t know, I don’t understand the science. They used some kind of machine to stimulate my brain, repair the damage, bring me back,” he explained.

“That’s not possible,” Barton whispered. “It’s not, it’s just – not. If we had tech like that –”

“They could save lives?” Coulson finished. “Why do you think they don’t? They had to try seven different ways to bring me back before it worked. Seven. I don’t remember all of them; I do remember the pain. By the time they finished, I didn’t want to live.”

That was more than he’d intended to admit, but it was easy, talking to Barton. It had been good to talk to May, but he’d had to be pushed into it; looking into Barton’s eyes, he wanted to tell him everything. He felt as if he trusted him enough to let him see his raw edges. Now that he’d started, the words were flowing better than he had hoped they would.

Still, a part of him wished he hadn’t confessed everything: Barton looked as if someone had punched him in the gut.

“They didn’t want me to remember that part,” he added, continuing quickly in the hopes that it would take Barton’s mind off what he’d just said. “So they implanted another memory: an alternate recovery, something pleasant.”

“Tahiti,” Barton whispered.

“Yeah,” Coulson nodded. “For a while it worked. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong, something more … Recently I was exposed to Theta brain-waves, and it restored the memories.” There was no need to go into the details of the kidnapping, the torture, the manipulation; especially not when Barton already looked broken. “Since then, I’ve been wondering: did they do anything else? Change anything else?”

Barton’s expression hardened. “You think they made you forget?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He swallowed hard. “I talked to one of the doctors who operated on me. He said there was catastrophic neurological damage. I think maybe … maybe those memories were affected, and they filled in as best they could?”

Barton nodded slowly. “They didn’t know about me, so they gave you the cellist.”

“Something pleasant,” Coulson said bitterly. “When I woke up, they told me that she’d been informed of my death.”

“But they couldn’t have told her if she doesn’t exist!”

Coulson held up his hand to halt Barton’s outburst. “I’m guessing she wasn’t. They probably told me that so I wouldn’t go looking for her. I still have the files, let me take another look.”

He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled the two files out: one marked Level Seven, the other simply stamped ‘Classified’. He flipped the Level Seven file open first and found the right page: the report of his death. He knew it well: he’d stared at it enough times, trying to summon the courage to ask Fury how the cellist had taken the news of his death. He had never managed it; the first he’d heard about her reaction was from Raina and the Clairvoyant.

“See?” he said, turning the file around so that Barton could look. He pointed at a section close to the bottom, where details of the notification of his next of kin was supposed to go. It read, _Partner informed by Notification Officers_ and was dated the day after New York.

“Just ‘partner’,” Barton said quietly, pulling the file closer to him. “No name?”

Coulson shook his head. It had struck him as odd, too. He’d lost agents under his command; he knew the paperwork, and so knew that the cellist’s name should have been mentioned somewhere. Then he’d rationalised it. He repeated his reasoning to Barton: “There were lots of lost agents, a massive cleanup operation under way. I figured they didn’t have time to fill in the paperwork properly – especially for a faked death.”

Even as he said it, the argument fell apart. His death had been real, and whatever Fury’s orders, the correct documents should have been filed even as the surgeons worked to bring him back.

Barton glanced up, scepticism written across his face, but he made no comment. Instead he nodded at the second file. “So what’s that?”

“What you’re looking at there is the version of events that I was allowed to see,” Coulson said. He laid his hand on the ‘Classified’ file. “This is what really happened.”

Barton stared down at the closed file. His jaw tightened and his fingers twitched. For a moment, Coulson thought he was going to ask to see it, then Barton looked up again. “What’s it say in there?”

Coulson opened the file, careful to flip over a few pages at once so that the pictures wouldn’t spill out. Those photographs showed things that Barton never needed to see, and he’d been through the documents enough times to know that the first sheets were notes on his seven post-mortem surgeries. It was only as he stared scanning over the rest of the pages that he realised how little he had taken in from the back half of the file. He’d been so focused on the medical documents, on what had happened to him, that he’d barely registered the rest of the forms. There were copies of a few release forms. One was a next of kin form with no names listed, and a note in his handwriting giving his permission for SHIELD to make decisions on his behalf if he was not capable of making them himself. Another was a consent form, authorising SHIELD’s medical and scientific departments to use his body for research after death. He shuddered; he remembered filling those in, thinking that he was doing the right thing. The memory of his resurrection resurfaced and he shuddered, turning the page and swallowing hard.

“Phil?” Barton asked. “You okay? Do you want me to –”

“No,” he said. It came out too harshly, and when he raised his head Barton looked hurt. He took a breath. “No, I’m fine. Let me find the right document.”

He went back to shuffling through the papers, trying not to think as he did so. He didn’t want Barton to see this. He’d shared it with May because he had to – his own self-preservation instincts wouldn’t let him try to deal with it totally alone, and he knew that May was the kind of person who wasn’t above breaking into his office and going through the file without permission, if she thought it was in his best interest. She was also a friend, one of the first he’d made at SHIELD, and he could trust her.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Barton. He did, implicitly, even without the additional layers that were apparently part of their relationship.

He’d known that May could take it. Normally he would have thought the same about Barton, but right now, he wasn’t so sure. Physically he was fine, but he seemed mentally fragile in a way that shook Coulson. He knew that the other man wouldn’t appreciate him thinking anything of the sort, but he couldn’t help it. Aside from that, he didn’t want to cause him any more pain.

It didn’t take him long to find the report of his death – the genuine report. It was identical to the copy in the Level Seven folder. He’d noticed that straight away and all but skipped past it in his subsequent inspections of the classified file. He scanned down it. Close to the bottom he read the damning words: _no next of kin on file_.

He stared at the piece of paper in front of him, his heart twisting in his chest. The thought that SHIELD – that Fury had betrayed him yet again was painful enough. There was also the cellist. She may never have existed outside of the implanted memories, but she felt real; reading this felt like he had lost her again.

When he didn’t say anything, Barton got up and pulled the file out of his hands.

“Don’t,” Coulson said, recovering himself enough to react, but it was too late. He made a grab for the file, but Barton was already out of his reach and reading. He watched Barton’s face change from curiosity to a grim sort of satisfaction.

He turned a page and Coulson stood up, holding out his hand.

“I’ll take that now,” he said firmly. When Barton ignored him completely, he snapped, “You are not authorised to view that material, Agent Barton.”

“Neither are you, sir,” he replied evenly. “You think I don’t know that that stamp on the front basically means ‘For Fury’s Eyes Only’?”

He found what he was looking for and pulled it out, tossing the rest of the file onto the desk. Coulson glanced down, and the tightness in his chest loosened as he realised that Barton hadn’t seen the photographs.

“Next of kin form,” Barton said, holding it up. “You don’t have anybody listed on here. I remember you said once, everyone you care about would know anyway if anything happened to you.”

Coulson’s eyes went out of focus for a moment. He remembered having that conversation in the aftermath of the 084 in New Mexico that had turned out to be Thor’s hammer. He’d been filling in death in the line of duty forms for hours before Barton came in and bullied him out from behind his desk, put him into a car and taken him for food. With death hanging heavy over them both, it was hard to talk about anything else, and they hadn’t tried hard to make conversation. Eventually, Barton had asked him about what arrangements he had in place for notifying his family, and Coulson had replied just as Barton remembered.

He blinked, and the memory fractured. Was he imagining that Barton had reached out and covered his hand, his grip warm and sure, and the only thing on that grim evening that was capable of settling him?

“Because everyone I cared about then was part of SHIELD,” he said softly. “But that was before – the cellist.”

“Yeah,” Barton said; he sounded tired. When Coulson looked at him, there were deep frown lines on his forehead and his eyes were bright. “Back then, we were both running a ton of different short-term missions, and not always together. When we were put on the same team, it was either just the two of us, or with Natasha, or a new set of agents every time. Then we both got assigned to Project PEGASUS, and – it got complicated. That’s when you came up with her.”

That made sense. He tried to think back, trace his relationship with the cellist to a point of origin. He couldn’t remember where or how they had met. Yet their dates had started shortly after he joined Project PEGASUS. He remembered thinking that it was the first job he’d been given in years that was expected to be long-term. It was a solid enough anchor that he’d allowed himself to start seeing someone. Or so he’d thought.

“Why d’you think you never changed your next of kin forms?” Barton asked.

“Maybe our relationship wasn’t there yet,” he replied. The words came out of his mouth caustic with sarcasm, and Barton snorted.

“Okay, point. But I know you know there’s a section on there about who gets informed if you die, even if they’re not your official next of kin,” Barton said, pointing at the form. “I’m pretty sure you would have added her onto that, if she existed.”

Coulson sighed and pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. There was a headache hovering behind his eyes, waiting to pounce. “You can stop trying to convince me, Barton.”

There was a beat of silence, then Barton asked, “You believe me?”

“Yes,” Coulson said.

Then he gathered up the pieces of paper, slid them back into the appropriate files and put everything back in the bottom drawer before he looked at Barton again. He wasn’t sure what he would see. He had to steel himself. Barton was looking at him with a mixture of nerves and amazement on his face, and it squeezed at Coulson’s heart.

“I’m not going to lie to you: I still don’t remember,” he said. “But the evidence is … compelling.”

“So,” Barton said hesitantly, “What now?”

“Now I want proof,” Coulson said. He stood up and started towards the door. “Come on, you’ll need to find yourself a seat with a belt.”

“Where are we going?” Barton asked as he scrambled down the spiral stairs behind Coulson.

Coulson didn’t answer. His team, minus Ward, were in the command centre and the screens were showing the interrogation room where Varga was being questioned. Coulson strode over and opened the door, but didn’t step inside.

“I want us in the air in the next ten minutes,” he said, using a tone that should prevent any arguments. “May, find out the Helicarrier’s current location and get us to the nearest airstrip.”

“You want to go to the Helicarrier,” Barton said.

Coulson looked across at him, then back at his team. “I need to talk to Director Fury. In person. Immediately. So get on it.”

May nodded and left the command centre. She gave him a look as she walked past him; although she said nothing, he knew he was due for an interrogation of his own later. He turned to go, but Fitz grabbed the door and held it open so he could call after him, “What about Varga, sir?”

“Tell Ward to finish up for now. Once we’re in the air, he can continue the interrogation.” He glanced at the screen. From the tension across Ward’s shoulders and the smirk across Varga’s lips, he guessed that they weren’t getting much out of him. “Maybe the threat of taking him to our headquarters will encourage him to cooperate.”

“What about my stuff?” Barton asked as Coulson led him over to one of the couches.

“Anything you can’t live without for a few days?” Coulson asked as Barton sat down.

“No,” Barton shrugged. “They started making me check my bow at the range, so …” he trailed off, leaving the words _it’s not here_ unsaid. “I guess I can get Stark’s people to pick up my clothes and bring them back on the jet.”

Coulson frowned and took a seat. “They won’t let you take your bow out?”

Barton’s bow was like an extension of his arm. He took it everywhere, protocols be damned. It wasn’t like it was SHIELD-issue anyway; though he’d taken advantage of the scientists’ tweaks and improvements, he’d bought the weapon and maintained it himself. He slept with it next to his bed – and Coulson was suddenly struck by a vivid sense-memory of waking up without an alarm on a rare day off, the sun in his eyes and the bow taking up the space on the other side of the bed. Then he remembered to breathe and it faded, but Barton’s hand was touching his arm.

“Coulson?” he asked. “Earth to Phil?”

He shook himself and took a deep breath. “Sorry.”

“Hey,” Barton murmured. His hand slid up Coulson’s arm to the back of his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of it even through his jacket. He leaned a little into the point of contact, just enough that Barton would be able to feel it.

Then he sat up straighter and cleared his throat. “So they don’t let you take your bow?”

Barton reluctantly slid his hand off Coulson’s back and nodded. “Yeah. Not since New York. They let me have access to the shooting range in New York, but I’m on a tight leash. You know, cause of …”

He pressed a finger to his temple and rolled his eyes, and Coulson chuckled despite himself.

“Missing all your psychological assessments probably hasn’t helped,” he said in an undertone, careful to keep his voice light and non-accusatory. That was the last thing Barton would respond to.

“Who do you think you are, my S.O. or something?” Barton said with a smile, leaning across to bump his shoulder against Coulson’s.

“Not your S.O.,” Coulson murmured. “Your friend. Can we start there?”

Barton looked at him, his smile fading slowly into a melancholy expression. Eventually, he said, “Yeah. That’s a good start.”

The relief that flooded over Coulson was more powerful than he’d been expecting. He’d been brutally honest with Barton in telling him that he couldn’t remember whatever relationship they had had before. It had to be hurting him. He could have easily thrown the offer of friendship back in his face as not good enough, or not what he wanted. Yet Barton was willing to meet him half-way. That was something.

May’s voice came over the intercom before either of them could say any more. “I’ve received the location of the Helicarrier. Wheels up in five.”

Coulson gave Barton a brief smile. “Better get comfortable.”

Barton glanced at the command centre, where it looked like FitzSimmons and Skye were deliberately delaying their exit. He cleared his throat and said, “Okay, this is going to be awkward. You think May would mind if I sit up front?”

He was already getting to his feet. Coulson smiled at him. “Go ask her. As long as you’re quiet, I don’t think she’ll mind.”

Barton stood up, then hovered for a moment before adding, “Look, I know you have a thing going on, with your team – I kind of crashed your ass-kicking party, I get that. You have stuff that you need to do, so, just – don’t worry about ‘entertaining’ me. I’ll just sit nice and quiet in the cockpit until we get to the States, so you can go and interrogate your guy or whatever. Okay?”

Coulson thought about it, then nodded. It made sense. He was jeopardising their mission enough by taking the team back to the US; the least he could do was actually focus on Varga and the information he could give them until they arrived.

Barton left, and as soon as he was through the door into the galley, FitzSimmons and Skye spilled out of the command centre. Coulson could feel them all working very hard not to look at him as they took their seats. A few seconds later, Ward joined them from the interrogation room and sat down, all without looking at Coulson. There was an uncomfortable silence, until Coulson couldn’t stand it any more.

“Ward. What’s happening with Varga?”

Relief flashed across the younger agent’s face, and Coulson could see that the other three were glad to have something to talk and think about that wasn’t what they’d seen in the interrogation room. Coulson too was glad of the distraction, and as Ward started to talk he felt himself starting to calm. His grief at losing the cellist was still there, irrational though it may be, and the scar over SHIELD’s betrayal had been ripped open again; but he still had a job to do, and focusing on that had got him through before. He focused as Ward told them everything he had learned so far, and everything that Varga had been reluctant to talk about. It kept the conversation going until the plane was in the air.

When May finally turned off the ‘fasten seatbelts’ signs around the lounge and they all unbuckled, Coulson turned to Ward. “Go back in there, see what else you can get out of him. Save telling him that we’re taking him to our headquarters as a last resort.”

Ward nodded and headed straight back to the interrogation room. Coulson looked around at the other members of his team.

“You three, get into Varga’s laptop, find out anything you can,” he ordered. “I’ll be in the command centre if you need me.”

FitzSimmons started to leave, but Skye hung back. “Is everything okay?”

Coulson considered for a moment. He didn’t want to lie to Skye any more, he’d done enough of that, but nor did he want her to worry. In the end, he said, “No. Things aren’t okay. But they will be.”

Skye offered him a small smile. “Okay, good.”

She left, and Coulson slowly got to his feet. He felt tired after the emotional drain of the past few hours, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him. He headed into the command centre, and turned his attention to the video feed of the interrogation room. They had plenty of time to kill before touchdown; it was going to take them twelve hours to reach the US mainland. That should be enough time to wring some information on Quinn’s location out of their guest.

~~~

When Coulson’s watch, still on Slovenian time, reached eight o’clock that evening, the team was still working. He sighed and called it, ordering Skye and FitzSimmons to collect Ward from the interrogation room on their way up. He headed to the cockpit for Barton and May. On his way through the galley, he grabbed enough pre-prepared meals to go around from one of the cupboards and stuffed them into the oven. No one had eaten since that morning, unless FitzSimmons had snacks squirreled away in the lab, which he hoped they didn’t given the kinds of experiments Simmons liked to set up just for fun. 

He pushed the door to the cockpit open and peered inside. May was in the pilot’s seat, but it was clear that Barton was actually in charge of the plane. His face was almost blank, but Coulson could spot the slight upturn of his lips. He liked flying; he wasn’t normally a big fan of the tedium of long-haul, and he much preferred small, agile planes – like the Quinjet – but right now he looked content.

“Everything okay, sir?” he asked without taking his eyes off the dials and readings, and the dark sky before them.

“Yeah. Food will be ready in ten,” Coulson told them. “Agent May, please remember that we do have an autopilot.”

“Thank you, Coulson,” she replied sarcastically, and he could sense her rolling her eyes, but he didn’t care. It wouldn’t be the first time May had skipped a meal on the pretext of piloting the Bus.

The team slowly assembled in the lounge. When the oven started to bleep, Skye and Ward went to collect the meals. They returned and handed them out, along with snacks and drinks. Before settling down to eat, Ward went back to the interrogation room with something for Varga to eat, and then stomped back out again. As he slumped into the vacant seat next to Barton, which everyone else had been avoiding, Barton held out his packet of chips. Ward gave him a look, but Barton just shook the packet at him until he gave in and took one.

“Tough day, huh,” he said.

It wasn’t a question, and Coulson knew why. Barton was good at reading people. He made sure that fact stayed out of his SHIELD files and under the radar, but Coulson trusted his judgement and had relied on it on more than one occasion; it was part of the reason why they’d brought Natasha in, rather than executing her. Barton might not have been around the team for long, but he could see the tension in Ward as well as Coulson himself – and he had figured out enough about the man to know that he wouldn’t want to talk about it.

“Have we got anywhere with the laptop?” Coulson asked.

Skye made a frustrated noise, then shot a furtive glance at Barton. When Coulson gave her a nod, she continued, “No. It’s completely dead. Fitz was working on it, but …”

She trailed off, looking across at him. “The circuitry’s fried,” he continued. “I’ve been trying to extract the hard drive without causing more damage, but I don’t know if it’ll be worth it.”

“We’ve been trying to look at his online profile, see if there’s anything stored on the cloud or in his records or even a clue on his social media, but so far _nada_ ,” Skye sighed. “I can’t even pull location data from his online interactions.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get there,” Coulson said. “Take the rest of the evening off.” When half the team rushed to protest, he held up a hand. “We’re due to land at around nineteen-hundred hours local time, which will be two in the morning to us. It’s been a long day. Get some sleep, we’ll wake you for the descent.”

There was an eruption of complaints, but eventually Coulson managed to usher most of the team into their quarters. He didn’t expect them all to sleep: Skye still had access to her phone and laptop, after all, and he suspected that FitzSimmons might sneak down to the lab. However, he hoped that as the night wore on, they might catch a couple of hours. He headed back to the lounge after shutting the door behind Ward and found it deserted apart from Barton.

“May’s in the cockpit,” he said, tipping his bottle of coke back to drain the last drops out of it. “She told me to tell you not to bother going up there.”

He hadn’t expected any different from May, and he had to admit that they should keep a watch, autopilot or not. He nodded. “Okay. Come on, I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

Barton hesitated. “I kind of figured that would be here.”

“Come on,” Coulson repeated with a small smile. He’d be damned if he was about to let Barton sleep on these couches. They were comfortable enough for sitting on, but he wouldn’t want to lie across the faux-leather and try to sleep with no blankets or pillow. The bunks weren’t exactly his favourite place to sleep, but the mattresses were high-quality memory-foam and that in itself made up for banging his knees on the wall every time he rolled over.

He led Barton up to the landing outside his office and slid open the door to his quarters. It was a cramped space, in theory slightly larger than the crew quarters downstairs, but Coulson had filled most of the standing space with his rack of suits. Barton stared at them, then at him. “This is where you sleep.”

“Not tonight,” he said. “I’m not going to get any rest anyway.”

“You need to,” Barton pointed out. His arm moved in a hastily aborted motion towards Coulson’s face, and then he looked away. “You look rough, Phil.”

“And you don’t? When was the last time you slept?” Coulson asked. Barton shrugged and muttered something that sounded like a lie. Barton’s eyes were heavy, and the circles around them were a dark shade of grey-purple. In the Bus’s low night-lighting, he looked like hell. Coulson touched his arm. “Clint, please. Don’t make me order you.”

“Fine,” Barton said, twitching his arm away.

“If you need anything, let me know,” Coulson said as Barton stepped inside.

He hesitated; part of him wanted to follow Barton in and make sure he actually climbed into the bed, but a larger part didn’t want to be in such a confined space with him, didn’t want his intentions to be misconstrued. He cleared his throat, suddenly feeling awkward, and turned away when Barton swivelled around to look at him, opening his mouth.

Barton didn’t call him back.

The disappointment struck him on the bottom step. It was out of the blue, and it hit him harder than he could have expected, even if he’d thought this might be coming. He sat down on the steps, his hand slipping from the banister to the support rails. His fingers latched there, trying to hold him in place. He blinked, unseeing, at the dark windows, and tried to breathe through the sudden tightness in his chest. He cared about Barton; of course he did. He’d liked him from the day he’d been assigned the new hot-shot who burned through supervisors like they were touch-paper. It had taken until their first real mission for him to realise that Barton’s self-preservation instincts were about as well-developed as his self-esteem, and that he didn’t just need an SO, but someone who cared enough to look out for him. He’d done that, at first because it was his job but increasingly because they were friends. Wanting to make sure he got enough sleep wasn’t a surprise.

He didn’t just want that. He’d wanted Barton to call his name, ask him to stay. He’d wanted to sit beside him and drive away whatever demons came to interrupt his sleep. He still did – even though he didn’t understand the impulse not just to make sure that Barton took care of himself, but to protect him.

Barton didn’t need protecting. Not like that. His upbringing and his training had made him tougher than shoe-leather. He didn’t someone to watch over him, not unless he was on a mission and that person was covering his back. It was irrational – but that wasn’t enough to stop Coulson from feeling it.

He sat at the bottom of the stairs for long minutes, trying to pretend that he wasn’t straining his ears over the gentle hum of the plane’s engine in case he heard a noise from above. However, no excuse to go back to Barton came. He forced himself to stand up. It was hard to walk away and put more distance between them – put him out of earshot – so Coulson did it fast and hurried through to the cockpit in the fastest walk he could manage without breaking into a jog.

May didn’t look around when he came in. She said, “You can take my bunk.”

“I’m not going to sleep,” he admitted as he slid into the co-pilot’s chair. “Why don’t you get some rest, I’ll keep an eye on things.”

“I’m not tired,” she replied, keeping her eyes fixed on the skies again.

“Okay,” Coulson said. It was May; there was no point arguing when she’d made up her mind.

He settled himself more comfortably in the co-pilot’s chair, and finally May looked over at him. He tried to curve his mouth into a smile, to reassure her, but he couldn’t manage it. She turned back to the windshield without a word, and he was grateful for that. He needed the companionship of another person’s presence, without the need for talk or questions or answers. He needed time to think, without being alone, and May’s company was good for that.

“Thanks,” he said in a small voice, but May didn’t reply.

~~~

Some time later, he said, “You were wrong.” 

“About what?” she murmured.

“It wasn’t just Tahiti.”

He looked over; May’s face was tight with concern. “How sure are you?”

“Pretty sure,” he replied, and then there was silence again.

~~~

Coulson roused the team and Barton in time for their landing at the military base that was closest to the Helicarrier’s location. 

FitzSimmons had snatched a few hours of rest: they had shuffled out of their respective quarters half-asleep. Skye yawned her way through the landing, but there were dark rings around her eyes that told him she hadn’t had much rest, if any at all.

Ward was harder to read; he had a military background, which had prepared him for rude and sudden awakenings, and he could slough off sleep easily. He was also good at hiding his weak spots, tiredness being one of them. Coulson couldn’t tell whether he’d managed to sleep or not, but he decided to send him back to his bunk regardless.

Barton should have been similarly inscrutable: he had the same background as Ward: military and then SHIELD Operations training. On top of that, Barton’s history had made him good at hiding what he didn’t want other people to see. Yet when Coulson looked at him, he could see that Barton was far from well-rested. He was squinting whenever the light got into his eyes, which suggested a headache, and his shoulders were tight.

Once they were at a standstill, Coulson ordered his team back to their respective quarters. This time there were no complaints, except from Skye.

“I don’t need to sleep,” she tried as he gently pushed her into her quarters. “I want to help.”

She sat down on the edge of her bed, but her laptop was within reach. Coulson held her gaze until she looked away, guiltily. “Do I need to confiscate that?”

Even though he couldn’t see it, he knew that she was rolling her eyes. “No.”

“Skye,” he said. He waited for her to look up before he continued, in a gentler tone, “Whatever leads you’re following will wait until tomorrow.”

She stifled a yawn and nodded. Coulson smiled, bid her goodnight and closed the door.

He had just made his way back to Barton when May came through from the cockpit and looked between the two of them. “What now?”

“Get some rest,” Coulson said. “I’m going to arrange a flight out to the Helicarrier.”

“Just commandeer a plane,” Barton said. “I’ll take you.”

Coulson looked at him and arched an eyebrow. “Are you fit to fly?”

Barton snorted. “Sir, I flew the Quinjet with a concussion. I think I can manage a Harrier on a couple of hours’ sleep.”

Coulson hummed dubiously at him, but didn’t argue when he started towards the exit and heard Barton get up to follow him. May stepped into his path and forced him to stop.

“You’re just going to walk out there and requisition a plane?” she asked. To most her face would seen expressionless, but Coulson could see the incredulity in the narrowness of her eyes and the bunched muscles of her jaw.

“Fury will sign off on it,” Coulson said. He’d make sure of that.

“You know that’s not what I meant. They’re already not exactly happy to see us, you heard them over the radio. It was only when I said we were low on fuel that they let us land at all. What makes you think they’re going to hand over a Harrier?”

“I’m just going to ask,” he replied. It was true that the air traffic control hadn’t been very cooperative, but Coulson wasn’t planning on talking to anyone that superior. 

Barton snorted, and both Coulson and May turned to look at him. “Like they’re going to say no.”

“What makes you so sure, Agent Barton?” May asked.

“Are you kidding?” he said with a grin. “You’ve never seen Coulson ask nicely for stuff?”

May glanced at Coulson, then shook her head. He could feel heat creeping up the back of his neck. It might not sound much like one, but he could recognise a compliment when he heard it. It was more the intonation in Barton’s voice than anything else, something warm and appreciative that made his heart swell.

“You should come watch, it’s h– uh, hilarious,” Clint finished lamely, his gaze darting away.

May didn’t show any sign of having noticed, but Coulson has caught the slip and seen the shape of the word that Barton had almost said. He cleared his throat and hoped that his shirt collar was still covering the flush on his neck; he very much doubted that would be the case.

“I think I’ll pass,” May said; she sounded dubious. Before she moved out of Coulson’s path to the exit, she said firmly, “Wake me if you need me.”

He nodded and promised, “I will.”

Then he and Barton headed out of the Bus in search of a Harrier to borrow.

 

As Barton had predicted, it took him less than fifteen minutes of polite but firm conversation to get his way with the ground crew and obtain a Harrier. He left take-off negotiations to Barton, who didn’t get very far until he cited a SHIELD protocol code that sounded official enough to be real. It wasn’t; Coulson had been through the book enough times to know the important ones.

After that, it was only a short flight to the Helicarrier. They didn’t talk much.

Barton performed a textbook landing on the flight deck and when they both climbed out of the Harrier, he was smirking. “Told you.”

“Yes, you did,” he agreed. “I’m going to see Fury. I want to talk to him alone.”

“Okay,” Barton said.

He followed Coulson anyway as he headed towards the Helicarrier’s nearest entrance. The corridors inside were quiet. The evening staff were in place, but there wasn’t the bustle of daytime; most agents would be below decks, in the gym or commissary, or relaxing in their quarters. Once they were inside, Barton picked up the pace until he was walking alongside Coulson.

After a few minutes, once he’d judged the route Coulson was taking, Barton asked, “You think Fury’s going to be in his office? It’s almost eight.”

“He’ll be there,” Coulson replied. He had to be. He didn’t want to face Fury anywhere else. Thankfully, he knew the man was nothing if not dedicated to his work; he’d found Fury in his office later than this on other occasions.

Unfortunately, he had also found Commander Hill still working this late. Sure enough, before they’d gone much further, she emerged from a side-corridor ahead and them and blocked the corridor ahead. She glanced between them, then placed her hands on her hips.

“Agent Coulson,” she said. Her voice was loud in the confines of the corridor. “What the hell is this?”

Coulson stopped, because he didn’t have much choice; the corridors weren’t that wide, and Hill was a superior officer who had asked him a direct question. “I need to see Fury.”

“Why are you with Agent Barton?” she asked, her voice tight.

“’Cause I went looking for him,” Barton replied. When Hill turned her icy stare on him, he shifted his feet a little further apart and folded his arms. “Problem?”

She slowly turned back to Coulson. “You do realise that this qualifies as disseminating classified information?”

“I’m well aware,” Coulson replied calmly. “We can discuss any disciplinary action you may think necessary later. My conversation with Director Fury can’t wait.”

Hill looked like she would quite like to put him in the brig until the morning, and then slap him with the most odious punishment she could think of, like a desk job somewhere in the bowels of one of SHIELD’s holding facilities where his responsibilities would be limited to cataloguing.

She asked, “Do you have an appointment with the Director?”

“No, but I think he’ll want to see me,” he replied. “If you’ll excuse us –”

“What about?” Hill asked, side-stepping to block Coulson as he tried to pass her.

“What do you think?” he hissed. His eyes narrowed as a frown pulled his brows together. He didn’t know how many people within SHIELD knew about the contents of the file that had been a secret even from him, but he was willing to bet that Hill was aware of what had happened, even if she didn’t know specifics.

Their gazes locked. Coulson allowed himself to blink freely under Hill’s glare, his expression otherwise unchanging. He was angry, about what SHIELD had done to him and the way he’d been treated since. Fury hadn’t offered an apology when he sent the file. It was clear that Hill wasn’t going to either. There was a long silence. Hill wasn’t going to back down. She was his superior: she shouldn’t have to – he should have backed down the moment she challenged him. That wasn’t an option. He was going to see Fury on his own terms. If that meant risking Hill’s wrath, so be it; but he wasn’t going to stand down.

“Sir,” Barton said after at least a minute had passed. “Do you need me to neutralise the Commander?”

“No,” Coulson replied after a moment that lasted long enough to reveal to Hill that he had seriously considered it. “Commander Hill is going to allow us to continue to the Director’s office unimpeded.”

Hill didn’t move. Nor did Coulson, but Barton unfolded his arms and let his hands curl into loose fists. “Sir, I can take Commander Hill down, just say the word.”

“I wouldn’t try if I were you, Barton,” Hill snapped, giving in and turning her head to glare at him.

“He won’t need to,” Coulson murmured, slipping past her.

She rounded on him. “Coulson!”

As she did so, Barton ducked around behind her and jogged to catch up with the quick pace that Coulson set as he started walking again. She could have stopped them; she could have called for backup, or simply followed them along the corridor and taken them down. Hill could more than handle herself in a physical fight, Coulson was well aware of that. She didn’t; she stayed where she was and watched them go.

It wasn’t over, Coulson knew that, but he had a short reprieve. Enough time to get to Fury, which was all he wanted anyway.

~~~

When they reached the Director’s office, the door was closed. Coulson paused for long enough to order Barton to wait outside, then he held his badge up to the scanner beside the door. When it opened, he strode inside and pressed the button on the inside to close it behind him. Fury looked up from the papers he was reading. 

“Agent Coulson,” he said. He didn’t sound surprised; he actually sounded disappointed. He swept the documents into a file and closed it, clasping his hands on top. He regarded Coulson silently for a few seconds, then said, “Have a seat.”

“Thank you, sir, I’d prefer to stand,” Coulson replied.

He made sure that the words were inoffensive and his tone remained mild, but he must have let something slip. Fury’s eye narrowed; he wasn’t buying it. This was the first time they’d seen each other since Coulson had requested the file, the first time they’d been in the same room since he’d discovered the truth. It would have been naïve of Fury to assume that everything was fine, so he was probably looking for anything off in his behaviour.

“Is there a problem?” Fury asked.

Coulson released a huff of laughter. He shook his head, not quite able to believe that Fury had the gall to ask him that. “Yes,” he said, the smile disappearing from his face as he continued. “There’s a problem. It wasn’t just Tahiti.”

Fury’s face changed from carefully neutral to the more familiar irascible expression. It was only a slight change, but Coulson saw it. Fury said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Like hell you do,” Coulson snapped, taking a step forward. “You changed my memories.”

“You have all the reports –”

“Then your doctors falsified their reports!” he shouted before Fury could give him any more platitudes. “I have gaps.”

“There was a lot of damage,” Fury said loudly, enunciating every word as if that could stop Coulson from interrupting him again. “We did our best to reconstruct –”

“You got it wrong,” Coulson said. His voice had dropped back to a normal level, but his words stopped Fury in his tracks regardless.

“What?”

“The cellist,” Coulson spat.

“You found her,” he breathed, his eye widening as he sat back in his chair.

“Let’s say she found me,” Coulson replied. It wasn’t wholly a lie, but he wasn’t ready to spit out the whole truth just yet. “I’m surprised you jumped to that conclusion, sir.”

“And why is that?” Fury asked. His tone was almost back to normal already, and he sounded on the edge of suspicion.

“Because you left me with nothing,” Coulson replied. He strode up to Fury’s desk and leaned his hands on the top. “I didn’t even have a name.”

Fury sighed and closed his eye for a moment. When he opened it again, he said, “We did try to recover everything we could. But there were some areas where the damage was too severe.”

Coulson stood up straight, and tried to make it look like he wasn’t recoiling from Fury’s words. He folded his arms. “So, what? You papered over the holes – badly?”

“We thought it would be easier for you to let go if your memories of your relationship were … vague. Maybe we were misguided, but we were trying to do the compassionate thing. Same as Tahiti.”

“Maybe,” Coulson repeated sarcastically. 

“We gathered every scrap of information we could, Agent Coulson,” Fury said. “But the truth is, you never told anyone much about your relationship. We couldn’t even find your cellist to ask her ourselves. I sent agents to every orchestra in New York and Portland, and damn near every town in between, but not one of them recognised your name or your face.”

Coulson thought of Barton’s story, that the cellist had been their cover. Barton’s version of events fitted with what Fury was telling him – if he was finally telling the truth, and it was hard to believe that after so many lies.

“You should have left the gaps,” Coulson said quietly.

“Maybe,” Fury said wearily. “But we couldn’t ask you –”

“No, because I was dead,” Coulson interrupted. “I was dead, and you brought me back just to put me through hell and stuff a bunch of fake memories into my head, and then tell me that I can’t have my life back!”

Fury didn’t even twitch, and it was that more than anything that broke the final thread holding Coulson’s composure together.

“The cellist was the only part of my life that didn’t belong to you, and you took that away when you declared me officially dead,” he said. It was almost impossible to keep his voice steady, but he tried as he continued. “I had to go into hiding until medical cleared me for work and you couldn’t keep me there any longer.”

“You were put into recovery,” Fury corrected.

“I was put under house arrest,” Coulson said coolly. “And then you reassigned me. I thought maybe if I couldn’t have my personal life back, I’d be allowed to have my work, but no. I don’t even get that.”

“If you’re not happy with your current command, Agent Coulson, we can –”

“No, I’ll keep the consolation prize,” Coulson replied, because now that he knew everything he was certain that that’s what the Bus was: his own team, to make up for losing everything else. Yet knowing that didn’t change the fact that he liked his team, and the work. It was just as important as the Avengers Initiative. Aside from that, it was the only good thing that SHIELD had given him since they brought him back to life. He wasn’t going to let Fury rip that away too. “That’s not the point.”

“Then what is?” Fury asked, leaning forward onto the desk.

“I didn’t get a choice,” Coulson replied. Fury signed and took a breath, but Coulson held up a hand to stop him from speaking. “I know there were some things you couldn’t ask. And you can’t undo bringing me back and changing my memories. But I’m done keeping that a secret.”

He turned to leave before Fury could argue. When he reached the door, he paused and looked back. “You got everything about the cellist wrong. Every damn thing.”

Then he opened it and stepped out into the corridor. Barton was still waiting for him in the corridor, standing at ease a few feet from the door. Coulson deliberately left the door open behind him and strode up to him.

“Agent Barton, I apologise in advance for my behaviour,” he said.

Barton was half-way through asking what behaviour when Coulson placed his hands on either side of his face and leaned into a kiss.

It was supposed to be brief. He wanted it to last long enough to make a point to Fury; that was all. But then Barton made a surprised sound against his mouth, his eyes flying wide open for a second before his lids fluttered closed. Barton’s hands bumped against his hips, skimmed up under his jacket and settled on his waist. His palms were solid and warm through Coulson’s shirt. He turned his head slightly, opened his mouth a fraction, and their lips slotted together. A tingle of pleasure spread from that point of contact – Barton’s lower lip between both of Coulson’s – and he was surprised at how familiar it felt. He moved one hand from Barton’s jawline to his upper arm, fingers gripping the leather until he could feel the shape of the muscle underneath. Barton smiled in response, breaking the kiss for a moment before he pushed into another. Barton’s teeth caught momentarily against his bottom lip and Coulson gasped, then curled his fingers around the back of Barton’s neck.

The noise Barton made was almost obscene. His hands fisted in the material of Coulson’s shirt and his body shuddered. Coulson felt a light brush of his tongue, then Barton closed his mouth around Coulson’s lower lip and sucked as he pulled away.

At some point, Coulson had closed his eyes. He slid his hand from the back of Barton’ neck to his shoulder before he opened them. Barton was hovering uncertainly about an inch away. Coulson swallowed; his voice was rough when he spoke.

“That I remember.”

The grin that spread across Barton’s face was infectious.

“Good,” he said. Then he released Coulson and stepped out of his grip, his smile softening as he did so. He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and sucked in a deep breath. “So, uh – I know you don’t remember, but –”

“I want to,” Coulson told him quickly. He didn’t want Barton to be in any doubt about that. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get everything back, but … I would like to try.”

“Okay,” Barton nodded. “How do you want to do this?”

“Don’t they recommend continuing the normal routine for people with amnesia?” Coulson said as he started walking back the way they had come.

Barton fell into step beside him, walking a little closer now, so that their shoulders and arms brushed more than occasionally. “You know as much as I do, sir.”

Coulson glanced across at him. “Do you usually call me ‘sir’?”

“Habit. We’re on the Helicarrier. I don’t when we’re off-duty, or outside of SHIELD premises,” Barton replied with a shrug. After a moment of silence, he added, “So, ‘normal routine’ is going to be a bit tough for us. I mean, with me suspended from active duty and you on your super-secret Bus.”

“Jealous?” Coulson smiled, deliberately nudging Barton with his shoulder.

Barton shoulder-checked him back. “Only of your team.” He paused, then added, “You guys work really well together.”

“We didn’t at first,” Coulson admitted.

Barton hummed but didn’t say anything. After a couple of corridors of silence, he blurted, “I could call you?”

Coulson smiled. “I’d like that.”

“I mean, sometimes I used to call you, when we were on separate missions,” Barton added. He shrugged. “Or text you.”

“I would come see you,” Coulson said hesitantly as a memory floated, glacially slow, into place. “Whenever we were in the same place.”

“Yeah, so next time you’re in New York you’d better come to my apartment,” Barton said. He sounded casual, confident even, but when Coulson looked across at him he could see the nervousness hiding behind his eyes.

“I will,” he promised.

The uncertain smile that tugged at the corner of Clint’s mouth made Coulson’s heart skip. His mind might have forgotten Barton, but his body seemed to have locked him away in its muscle-memory. He remembered Barton on a visceral level, in the touch of his mouth and the effect of his smile. Familiar little things that no one would think to drop into a false memory, and so things which hadn’t been overwritten by ‘the cellist’.

“What if you don’t remember?” Barton said abruptly, coming to a halt so suddenly that Coulson kept going for a couple of paces before turning to look at him. “What if – what if we try, but you can’t remember any of it?”

“Then we start again,” he said. “Is that good enough for you?”

“Is that what you want?” Barton asked. He looked so worried. Coulson went across to him and took hold of his upper arms, stroking gently with his thumbs.

“It is,” he replied.

His feelings for ‘the cellist’ ran deep – too deep to be an implant or a fake, he was convinced of that. SHIELD had re-assigned them to ‘the cellist’, but once he had felt that way about Barton. He licked his lips, remembering the kiss, and the thrill that had run down to his toes. He could feel that way again. He just wasn’t sure if Barton – if Clint would want to wait for him to catch up.

“Then it’s what I want,” Clint said.

“Good,” Coulson said. Clint’s answering smile was full of hope.

Then his face fell as his gaze flickered to something over Coulson’s shoulder. He heard footsteps, and when he turned to look there was a small security squad coming towards them. Clint groaned. “Oh, come on. You have got to be kidding me.”

“Agent Coulson, Agent Barton,” the lead security officer said, looking at each of them in turn. “Commander Hill has requested your presence in her office.”

Coulson glanced across at Clint, who was shaking his head slightly. He tried to smile. “You didn’t really think it was over, did you?”

“Yeah, well,” Clint said, “She could’ve given us five minutes before she ruined everything.”

“Everything isn’t ruined,” Coulson said gently. He reached out and brushed his fingers against Clint’s hand. Clint’s arm twitched, as if he’d been about to do something and then stopped himself.

“Let’s get this over with,” he sighed, nodding at the security detail. “Lead the way.”

~~~

They were escorted to Commander Hill’s office in silence, but when they arrived she wasn’t there. The security squad ushered them in and left them to wait. Coulson took a seat, while Barton mooched around looking at everything with a lot less courtesy than he’d showed for Coulson’s belongings on the plane. However, Hill’s office didn’t have room for anything as sentimental as personal belongings. Before the Bus, Coulson’s hadn’t either, but he’d needed somewhere to store his collection after SHIELD cleared out his house in order to complete the charade of his death. They’d offered him a secure, temperature- and humidity-controlled vault, but that wasn’t what his trinkets and collectibles were for; he didn’t buy them so that they could sit in perfectly-preserved darkness. He’d bought them to enjoy them. 

At least now he got to see them every day. 

“I wouldn’t,” he warned when Clint wandered behind the desk and looked thoughtfully at the drawers.

“Hey, what’s the worst she can do? I’m already suspended.” he replied. He tried the top drawer as he spoke, but it was locked, as were the others. He gave up and flopped into the seat next to Coulson.  
“Maybe she’ll fire me. At least then she’d have to give me my Goddamn bow back.”

“Hill won’t fire you,” Coulson said. “You’re a valuable asset.”

Clint snorted, but didn’t say anything.

It was a good twenty minutes before Hill joined them, and during that time Clint had gradually slouched lower and lower in his chair. As she took a seat at her desk, Hill glared at him, but he didn’t adjust his posture. If anything, he squirmed a little lower just out of defiance.

“I’ve just been speaking with Director Fury,” she said to both of them, before turning to address Clint. “He has recommended that no disciplinary action be taken for your actions tonight, Agent Barton.”

Her lips were pulled into a narrow line. She wasn’t happy with the orders she’d been given. How could she be, after the blatant disregard for her authority that Clint had shown earlier? Yet she was going to follow them regardless; Hill was a good agent like that. She continued to glare at Clint for a good thirty seconds, and Coulson knew that she was expecting some words of gratitude, or at least an apology. Clint didn’t give her anything. He’d barely even acknowledged that she was speaking to him at all. Eventually, she had no choice but to continue.

“You are to remain on suspension until medical clears you for active duty. The Director has asked me to remind you that you are grounded. That includes private flights, Barton.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Clint said, and there was sarcasm in every syllable. Coulson didn’t dare look at him.

Hill turned her sharp expression on him. “Agent Coulson, the Director has placed you on compassionate leave. You have one month –”

“No,” Coulson snapped. All of the anger he felt towards Fury and SHIELD welled up inside him. “He can’t.”

“– After which you will rejoin your team on board SHIELD mobile command 616,” Hill continued as if she hadn’t heard. She paused for a moment and Coulson noticed the tension in her jaw. When she continued, her voice was considerably more irritable. “However, please be aware that this compassionate leave may be cancelled at any point should you be required in the field.”

“Commander Hill –”

“This is not a negotiation.”

“I don’t need compassionate leave,” Coulson shouted, getting up and glaring at her. “You know damn well –”

Hill got up and faced him across the desk. “Take it, Coulson. And be thankful it’s not going on your record as a suspension for multiple counts of insubordination, dereliction of duty, and dissemination of classified intelligence.” She held up a hand, silencing the protest he was about to make. “You’ll remain on the Helicarrier until the morning. Security will escort you to your quarters. Tomorrow morning, we’ll have a plane to take Agent Barton back to New York. We can arrange accommodation for you if you need it.”

“You know I do,” Coulson said bitterly. SHIELD hadn’t just cleared his place; they’d actually sold it, and Hill would be aware of that. Aside from the Bus, he had nowhere to call ‘home’ any more. “What about my team?”

“The Director is informing Agent May now,” Hill replied calmly. “I’m sure they are capable of operating without you for a few weeks while you get your head straight. Figure out where your loyalties lie.”

 _Not with SHIELD_ , Coulson thought, but he bit back the words. Even though he felt betrayed now, he knew he’d regret an outburst like that. Instead, he said, “I want my status reclassified.”

“I already told you that this isn’t a negotiation,” Hill said. She was getting angry, he could see that, but he was already strides ahead of her on that front. He wasn’t going to back down.

“I’m not leaving this office until I have the right to tell people that I am alive,” he said.

His voice was calm and steady, but only because he had years of training and practice. Over the years, he’d negotiated with terrorists and billionaires and people with super-powers. Hill might be his superior, but she didn’t intimidate him.

“He should have that right anyway,” Clint growled from his chair. He sounded the way Coulson felt: at the end of his tether, the rage boiling up and threatening to spill over.

Hill picked up the phone and tapped in the code for Fury’s office. After a few seconds, she said, “You need to make the call, sir.”

“Not his call,” Clint grumbled, earning himself a glare from Hill, but the support made Coulson stand a bit taller, breathe a little easier. It was a reminder that he was in the right, for all that Hill and Fury were making it feel like he was wrong.

Hill put the phone down. “It’s done. Declassified.”

“Good,” Coulson said. He turned to leave and Clint followed. Once outside Hill’s office, they were met by a security team, which they both ignored.

“That went well,” Clint said. One of the security guards tried to step in front of him; he grabbed the man by his bulletproof vest and shoved him behind him again without breaking stride.

Coulson smiled at him. “Well, we got a result,” he pointed out. Then he fished in his pocket for his phone. “Sorry, I need to make a call …”

“Sure, whatever,” Clint said, waving a hand. They reached an elevator, and Clint glanced over his shoulder at the security team, as they herded them inside. “Okay, where are we going, guys: crew quarters or brig?”

Coulson chuckled as he brought the phone up to his ear. It rang twice before Skye picked up.

“Coulson, what the hell?” she snapped before he had chance to say hello. “May just told us. What’s going on?”

“Despite what Fury may have told you, I’ve been suspended,” he replied evenly, which earned a few surprised glances from the security team as the elevator doors slid closed.

“What?” Skye said. She sounded shocked. “Wait, let me put you on speaker.” There was a soft crackle of static, probably Skye’s hand brushing the phone’s mic, then: “Okay, now can you please explain what is going on?”

“I can’t –”

“Coulson, if you tell me that this is classified, I –”

Coulson raised his voice and cut her off. “I can’t talk right now. I’m in an elevator surrounded by security, and this is not a conversation I want to have over the phone.”

“Wait, security?” Skye had raised her voice, her disbelief and anger bleeding into her tone. She was good at a lot of things that SHIELD classed as essential skills: deceit, subterfuge, deflection. Yet there was one thing Coulson didn’t think she’d ever truly master: the ability to bottle her emotions. The thought made him smile fondly even as he had to hold the phone slightly further away from his ear and she continued. “Are they locking you up?”

He noticed Clint was giving him a look and frowned at him. Clint huffed a laugh and muttered, “Kid likes you.”

Coulson allowed himself to smile as he looked away.

“They’re not locking me up,” he told his team. He glanced at the elevator’s button panel, just to confirm what level they were exiting at, but they were indeed going to the crew quarters, not the cells. “But they aren’t letting me come back to the Bus.”

“Why?”

“I’m guessing because he disclosed Level Seven information to a Level Six agent who was currently on suspension and undergoing psychological evaluation,” May said. Coulson knew her well enough to recognise that her bland tone was not accusatory; she was just relaying her interpretation. He hoped that the rest of the team knew that too. Then she rolled out the sarcasm. “Maybe because he dragged us half way around the world on a personal matter when we’re in the middle of a mission.”

“I had to,” Coulson said.

“I know,” May said. There was a slight pause, then she said, “We all do.”

There was a long silence. The elevator arrived at their designated floor and the security team ushered them out and along a featureless grey corridor. Coulson tried not to sigh as he said, “I have to go.”

“Wait!” Skye said. “What are we supposed to do?”

“You continue the mission,” Coulson said. “Find Quinn.”

“When will you be back, sir?” Ward asked.

“In a month,” Coulson said. He tried not to sound bitter, for the sake of his team, but he wasn’t sure if he managed it. There was a murmur of dissent on the other end of the line, so he added, “Fury said I could come back sooner, if you need me. But you won’t. You’re a team; you’re more than capable of interrogating Varga and following up on his information.”

“We’ll keep you posted,” May said.

“Fury won’t authorise –”

“What Fury doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she interrupted, in a tone that suggested that she knew that calls originating within the Helicarrier would be monitored, and didn’t care.

Coulson smiled. “Thank you.”

He terminated the call without saying goodbye because he didn’t want to hear them echo the words back at him. It would be too final.

“You okay?” Clint asked, one hand landing between his shoulder blades, the touch barely there before it was gone again.

Coulson nodded. “I’m fine.”

“No you’re not,” Clint said, but he didn’t push, and Coulson was grateful for that.

The security detail came to a halt and the leader informed them that they would be on opposite sides of the corridor. Then they stood around in the hallway, clearly waiting for them to disappear into their respective rooms. Clint rolled his eyes.

“This is not how I expected tonight to end,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow morning?”

Coulson nodded and, in light of their company, decided to keep things formal. “Good night, Agent Barton.”

Clint’s mouth turned up at one corner.

“Night, Coulson,” he murmured, then he turned and strolled into his room. Before he closed the door, he nodded to the security team leader and drawled, “You can lock me in now.”

Coulson smiled to himself as he turned and let himself into his room. Despite the situation, at least he could rest easy knowing that Clint was just as unimpressed with the way the two of them were being treated. Once the door was closed, he heard it lock behind him.

Finally he let out the sigh that had been building ever since the phone call to his team, but he didn’t give in to the rage. Tempting as it was to shout into the hidden security cameras, to call Fury and yell at him directly until he felt better, there wouldn’t be much point; it wouldn’t change anything.

Instead, he focused on calming his breathing as he removed his tie, jacket, shoes and socks, and unfastened his cuffs and collar. Once that was done, he padded into the tiny en-suite, which was just large enough for a toilet and sink, and unwrapped the toothbrush that had been left in its plastic wrapper on the cistern so that he could clean his teeth. The repetitive motions and the routine helped to tranquilise the anger. He could recognise that it wasn’t gone, just sedated for a while, but that was good enough for the time being.

He didn’t unstrap his holster from around his chest until he was about to lie down on the bed. He placed it carefully on the night stand and made sure that he could get to his gun without having to fumble before he settled on the bed.

He didn’t bother to get under the covers. The adrenaline had finally started to drain out of his system, and the number of hours he had been awake was catching up fast. The mattress made of the same memory foam as his bed on the Bus. Although the roar of the Helicarrier’s engines was more distant and at a different pitch, if he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that he was still there. Dimly he could hear voices, muffled through the walls, and with a little imagination it was his team sitting in the lounge talking late into the night as their plane soared through the darkness. It was a nice fantasy to indulge in while he fell asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic idea (Clint is the Cellist) has been bouncing around in my head since The Avengers. The idea of Coulson not remembering that fact because of "Tahiti" is just an added bonus really. >D
> 
> I would love to one day write a sequel to this fic explaining how we get from Coulson being totally-not-suspended-it's-compassionate-leave to TRACKS.


End file.
